Saturday, 30 January 2016

RIDING ALONG ON THE CREST OF A SLUMP

My first trip to football since December 19th was at Brunton Park last week where over 7,500 turned up to see the Cumbrians return home after the floods. It did the heart good to see it, though I wonder if watering the pitch was really such a good idea.The following day my father phoned. 'Typical Boro, coming down with the Christmas lights,' he said.As previously explained here, my father knows nothing whatsoever about football (and cares less) but forty years of working in the Teesside steel industry have left him fluent in the games clichés. He may not know what he's talking about, but he knows all the received wisdom and when to deliver it. He'd make an ideal pundit for Match of the Day, really.Anyway, though there is some debate over how many games constitute a run, here's something I wrote about a previous post-Yuletide crisis at the Riverside.

There is
no one smugger than a vindicated cynic, which is why a certain amount of
self-satisfied smirking is going on around Teesside at the moment. Tony
Mowbray's team, you see, have just lost three league games in a row.

It is one
of the immutable laws of comedy that through repeated use a joke moves from
being funny to being boring and then back to being funny again. To such beloved
catchphrases as "This is a local shop for local people", "I'm
the only gay in the village" we have long since added
"Middlesbrough's traditional post-Christmas slump", variations of
which appeared on just about every festive greeting I received from Boro fans
last year.

In the
minds of many, Boro's league campaign follows a seasonal pattern that is
as unchanging as Steve Rider's hair. They push to the upper reaches of whatever
division they are in before Christmas, then in the new year slide downwards
faster than Tom Croft on a skeleton bob.

Injuries
and a wafer-thin squad are factors to which Boro's current unhappy run has
been attributed. Perhaps the explanation is simpler than that, though. Maybe
after Christmas the players become tired from the effort of marching against
the tide of history while carrying the burden of low expectation.

Of course, Middlesbrough fans are not alone in expecting
the worst once the fairy lights have come down. West Bromwich Albion, Charlton
Athletic and Leeds United are three of the other clubs who face January with
the wariness of an incontinent puppy. The Baggies can point to the 1981‑82
season as an exemplar of the way that what for the general populace is a single
"Blue Monday" splurges out across the whole of their January and a
fair bit of February, too. Leeds, meanwhile, finished 2009 in second spot in
League One with an 11‑point gap to third place, only to see the days of turkey
curry and people muttering "I've hoovered this place six times and I still
keep finding pine needles" usher in a spell that saw them win only three
of their next 16 matches. Eventually the Elland Road club squeaked into an
automatic promotion slot by a single point.

When a
slump occurs everybody in football knows that it must be arrested. The only way
to arrest a slump is to turn the corner. However, getting to the corner without
the wheels coming off in what is a pressure‑cooker situation is by no means an
easy task. Dave Bassett is one man who knew how to cope. The well-scrubbed
former Wimbledon boss was for a while the Benedict Cumberbatch of slump
arresting. After leaving the Dons he made a speciality of that rarest of all
football phenomena, the post‑Christmas anti-slump. In 1990‑91 Bassett's
Sheffield United side failed to win in their first 16 games and were bottom on
Christmas Day with a meagre nine points. They went on to celebrate the new year
by winning seven matches on the trot and finished the season 13th. How he did
it remains a mystery. Bassett, who strode into press conferences giving off old-fashioned
British manly odours of lanolin, talcum powder and social discomfort, has
unfortunately remained predictably tight-lipped on the topic. And the fact he
later failed to arrest a post-Christmas slump at Leicester City that lasted
four winless months at the start of 2002 led many to suspect he never
actually knew in the first place.

None of
which helps Mowbray. The Victorians believed that sport prepared a young person
for life. The only existence following Middlesbrough would ready anyone for is
one of endless repetition, working on an assembly line or being Alan Hansen,
perhaps. It is a steady drip of minor frustrations. Like the drops of water in
the infamous Chinese torture each is nothing in itself. Added together,
however, they are agony and every once in a while you just have to cry out.

During a
memorable post-Christmas slump of the Bryan Robson era – a time when Boro's
pursuit of a place in European football inevitably turned into a desperate
struggle to avoid Saturday afternoons in Crewe – one denizen of the North
Stand did just that. Over and over and over. He was a great slab of a
fellow who, in his red-and-white replica shirt, looked like someone who had
come to a fancy dress party as a Parcelforce van.

He was
a grumbler to start with but, when the smoking ban was introduced, things
really turned sour. Uncomforted by nicotine the man's spirits plummeted
like a gannet after sprats. He groaned, he howled, he predicted dire
consequences in all situations. The award of a throw-in to the opposition
in their defensive quarter of the field saw him pull a face straight
out of Edvard Munch with sound effects to match. The announcement of injury
time was like the death scene in Camille. Eventually it all got too much
for a bloke sitting two rows down. Midway through a 0-0 stalemate he stood up,
turned round and pointed at the moaner. "How, mate, did the stewards
confiscate your scythe, or what?" he roared. The moaner looked
puzzled. "You sound like the grim fucking reaper," the man bellowed
by way of explanation. "I bet your lass renews your season ticket just to get you out the bloody house."

I prefer to keep my pain private and as a form of self-mutilating protest I
am refusing to sit up waiting for the Football League Show until Middlesbrough
win again. Since this may not happen until post-Christmas becomes pre-Christmas
again I will sadly be unable to report on the progress of Steve Claridge's slow
metamorphosis into Blakey from On the Buses.

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About the Blogger

Harry Pearson is the author of The Far Corner and nine other works of non-fiction, including Slipless in Settle - winner of the 2011 MCC/Cricket Society Prize. From 1997 through to 2012 he wrote over 700 columns for the Guardian sports section. He has worked for When Saturday Comes since 1988.

About This Blog

When The Far Corner came out a well known football writer whose work I like and respect told me he been unable to finish it. Too much non-League. Too many howls of outrage in the lumpy rain of steeltown winters. Not enough rapture. ‘I’m only interested in the great stars, the great occasions,’ he said, ‘To me football is like opera.’

I don’t care much for opera. And so I have carried on much as I did before: writing about unsung people in rough places where the PA plays 'Sex on the Beach' in the coal-scented February fog and men with ill-advised hair bellow, 'Christ on a bike, this is the drizzling shits.'I could justify this with grandiosity. I could say Dickens and Balzac, Orwell and Zola were more interested in the lower divisions of society than its elite. I could tell you that the sportswriters I most admire are almost all Americans whose primary subject is boxing. AJ Liebling, WC Heinz, Thomas Hauser, Phil Berger and the rest inhabit a world where hucksters, gangsters, the desperate, the doomed and the mad hang out in stinking gyms and amidst the rattle of slot machines, and trainers such as Roger Mayweather say things like, "You don't need no strategy to fight Arturo Gatti. Close your eyes, throw your hands and you'll hit him in the fucking face."

But that is to be wise after the event. Norman Mailer said every writer writes what he can. It is not a choice. We play the cards we're dealt.

A few years ago I stood in a social club kitchen near Ashington listening to an old bloke named Bill talk about a time in the early 1950s when, on a windswept field at East Hirst, beneath anthracite sky, he’d watched a skinny blond teenager ‘float over that mud like a little angel’, glowing at the memory of Bobby Charlton.

Opera is pantomime for histrionic show offs, but this? This is true romance.

The First 30 Years features some new writing and lots of older pieces going back to the late-1980s. This work first appeared in When Saturday Comes, The Guardian, various other newspapers, fanzines and a number of those glossy men's lifestyle magazines that have women in bras on the cover. It is my intention over the next year or so to collect it all here, if for no other reason than to prove to my family that I did do some work every once in a while.

In keeping with the original rhythms of the game I'll post a new piece every Saturday (kick-off times may vary)

The best images here have been provided by a trio of the great photographers I've been lucky enough to work with over the years. I'm very grateful to Tim Hetherington, Colin McPherson, and Peter Robinson for letting me use their work - all of which is copyright of those individuals and cannot be reproduced without their permission.